ABSTRACT
In June 1767 John Wilkes, weary of exile, grumbled about the indifference of the British aristocracy to his plight. ‘The great expect you shou’d bear all, and never utter a whisper of complaint’, he wrote.1 He had expressed such sentiments before. On 17 February 1764 he declared: ‘I am too proud ever to ask a pardon, or even to receive favour from any of the great (however great) whom I hate and despise.’2 But this outburst, born of frustration, was not yet a settled conviction. What was different and significant about the comment in June 1767 was that around the time he made it, Wilkes was starting to look for political succour from a different quarter: the plebeian citizens of the metropolis. The implications of this shift merit careful examination, but there is an important question that needs to be addressed first. Why, in light of his persecutions, had Wilkes remained attached for so long to the belief that it was from the ranks of ‘the great’ that he would find his principal friends and benefactors? After all, what transpired in Parliament on 15 November 1763, as described in the previous chapter, had the finality of a ritualised ejection from an exclusive Mayfair club. Only Lord Temple offered token resistance as his fellow peers rounded on his client for the offence of the Essay on Woman.3 That episode was followed by Wilkes’s expulsion from Parliament, his convictions for sedition and impiety, and his outlawry. One can scarcely conceive of a more thoroughgoing expulsion from elite society.
